25 States in 25 Days

saba jana-worku

Voyage from Virginia

The grass beneath me brushes my knees and ankles as I scrawl a sketch of the Japanese maple that shudders and sways above me in the breeze. My newly eight-year-old hands, incapable of my mother’s precision, produce more of a hunched scribble than likeness of the tree’s poised stature. Matthew—my stepfather, Naomi—my older sister, and my mother have just finished loading the last of our things into the trunk and black leather passenger seats of the bronze Mercedes. My mother’s car sits in the tulip-lined driveway, the recently revved engine growling with anticipation. Shimmering in the light of the August sun, it is hot to the touch—Ready.

Amoeba Somewhere in Louisiana

Hours on the road, heavy and thick as oil slick molasses, lead us to a Louisiana campsite. We drive up a gravely trail to campsite security, a small booth constructed with mahogany wood and stained by time. An all-knowing woodswoman points our way on a small foldable map and instructs us not to use the running water in the showers or from outdoor spigots. That if we plan to bathe in it, we should invest in nose plugs and earplugs. I do not know what amoeba means, even after an explanation from Matthew, but the word tastes new and sour-silly and brings me thorough entertainment. I roll it around over the roof of my mouth each time I remember it the remainder of our time here.

The sun turns everything golden by the time Matthew has finished setting up the tent for the first time this trip. Golden grass and trees and even golden soil. Gold in the firepit, gold in brown eyes. I like the tent’s tangy polyester scent. It is large enough for me to do a cartwheel down the center. I have done many, spun the world around more times than I can count or care to. I remember a short wooden fence that seems more like a suggestion than a boundary. Sitting with my back against its wooden post and waiting for night to fall.

Vampires in New Orleans

Wailing brass, ornate, flora-filled balconies everywhere, everywhere. We walk and we walk and we walk in the hottest, muggiest heat I have ever waded through. Dark leather-skinned men buzz a jovial eruption of music from their trumpets and tubas and trombones. I am enamored by it. Here I am free from what little I know about my differences. Copper-colored waitresses tell me I am beautiful. I feel beautiful.

We step into a cavernous cathedral, the chilled air milky sweet relief from the scalding heat. Most of it slips now, but I remember smooth white walls towering above my four feet. If there are windows, they are covered. It is cool and dark and safe, the light of our star is not allowed inside. I beg my mother for a souvenir. A tiny silver box with a magnetic lid not any taller than a quarter. Inside are little metal charms. One of prayer hands, one a cross, and one I lost that day somewhere on the French Quarter streets. I take them out and turn them between my thumb and index, smooth and cold.

We continue into the cloudless heat, relishing in the shade of cramped alleyways. My mother steps into a shop tucked away within one, the cursive on the sign too intricate for me to decipher. A few minutes pass and she reemerges horror-struck. I ask her what is wrong. She doesn’t tell me. She only whispers to Matthew and Naomi, too far above for me to hear. I am upset by this. I don’t like to be left out. I don’t like feeling like the little one. But sadness stings my eyes and I feel even littler.

***

Years later she tells me what she saw—what she felt. An unwelcoming man behind the counter, more like him wandering about the shop. A darkness, a hunger crawling beneath their skin. Trekking deeper, she saw chicken feet and eyes of newt. Pouches of blood and hearts once beating now winter still.

Waterpark in Austin

The aquamarine water is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. But I am scared of swimming. I have taken swimming lessons, been honored for my skill with small, silky ribbons. But I no longer deserve to wear these ribbons. I’ve forgotten what I’d learned that week. Matthew tries to teach me again. I shove my fear aside long enough, my scrawny, prepubescent limbs obey me long enough to pretend like I’ve miraculously remembered.

When I think back to this day, I cannot clear away the misty sheen of youth that tints my view, brightens the sun and the sky and hues of floaties and pool toys and waterslides. The seashells of innocence that are the conches of my ears, boosting the laughter and cuts through water causing booming splashes.

Genesis in El Paso

The car rolls up to a spiffy, one story mid-century modern home at a time before I know how to wield these words. The horizontal strips of glass perforating the front door look too futuristic for this to have been my mother’s first home. I see only the house. Everything else fades into the sandy Texas hills in the distance. The house still surfaces in my mind every once in a while, like a sliver of a fluffy, weightless dream. My mother cries in a new way. A way I’ve only just learned about. These are what she calls tears of joy. Joy fills her sequoia eyes and trickles down her honey brown face and onto a vibrant v-neck tee shirt. She sweeps joy from her skin and onto the tips of her fingers before walking up to the house and knocking on the front door, expectant, though of what, I’ve never been sure. She knocks again. I watch from my warm leather seat. I can smell the muggy heat that occupies the car like an additional passenger. I can still smell it.

The door never opens. No mean-spirited man turns her away. No heartwarmed woman invites her in to see how things have changed—the time that’s passed. I almost think it’s better this way. This moment doesn’t end in calamity, nor does it break something in her the way things too brilliantly bright do—Lifting these iridescent orbs of memory from their places beneath settled dust, reflecting over them the light of the stars.

Fear of Falling to the Depths of the Grand Canyon

We arrive at the national park while the ink of night still stains the earth. I cannot see it, not really. But I feel an absence somewhere nearby where the chasm begins. A blackness that could swallow me whole if it wanted to. We set up camp for only one night here, packing everything away in the morning before we visit the Canyon.

There is no guardrail, nothing keeping me from the terra cotta bottom. From spreading my feathered wings and soaring through the red and purple stacks of rock. Adrenaline is metallic behind my tongue. A primal fear enters my bloodstream, my heart pumping faster and harder than ever before. I feel it strong beneath my chest, beneath the neon letters on my purple crewneck that spell out Grand Canyon. I squeeze my mother’s hand for most of our descent, often reaching awkwardly behind me when the trail gets slim, my other hand gliding along the canyon wall. When we stop on occasion to rest in shade and drink ice water, I wrap my arms around her, shut my eyes, and will a shiny pink bubble around us. I hold her hand not because I am afraid, though I so intensely am. I hold her hand because I will not let anything happen to her. And if something does, so will it to me. Many times I almost cry, my love for her too immense to fill even a canyon this grand.

This is the most present I will ever be. My ears are tuned to the foamy crunch of our footfall, my heart halting at the sound of each slide. I feel Mom’s tree trunk hand in mine. I memorize it in case of disaster. The mountain range of her knuckles, the strength of her grip. The steep drop in my peripheral burns into my retinas.

The hike to the Canyon’s floor being several days long, we never reach the bottom. We picnic at a stopping point—an expanse of rock wide enough and flat enough not to worry so much about the edge, though my eyes remain trained on it, lest it recede without my knowing. The flavor of my ham and cheddar sandwich is altered by the adrenaline that remains tucked at the back of my throat. The climb back to the top doesn’t feel as long or treacherous, but I am grateful for the promise of ceaseless solid ground once we are spit from the mouth of the Canyon.

Magic in the Muir Woods

I do not remember the drive to the Muir Woods. Maybe I have just awoken from a dream of limitless cosmos. Maybe it is lost in grey matter. However I’ve gotten here, I watch from the back seat as we drive through a gaping space carved into a redwood tree. An electricity runs through me, a tingling over my scalp as we pass through, hot and silver. Salt pours from my mother’s eyes again. She cares for this in a way I haven’t yet learned to care for anything.

To Vegas

I sit enveloped by a blanket in the back seat of my mother’s sedan. I cannot see her. I have been here long enough for time to melt into itself and pour out of itself and down my throat like hot apple cider, stinging, stinging the dryness. The dark purple clouds hovering at an arm's length turn white with streaks of fire reaching out for me. Sheet lightning.

The weight of sleep presses further into the palms of my mother’s hands and over the lids of her eyes. Matthew’s eyes are glued to the road, coffee on his breath. Naomi scans the last few pages of her second book today. To my mother, I sleep, or try to, in the seat behind her. She cannot see me. She cannot see me, but I have been quiet long enough to lead her to believe as much. The clouds far above us are dark as midnight, lulling us all. She pushes them away. She must keep her eye out for someplace to stop. Matthew hunts and she must gather. Granting her wish of wakefulness, heavy light booms inside the cloud. For a moment, it is daytime and she is wide awake.

Moab Desert Sandstorm

By the time we set up camp, the sky begins to soften into evening. A perfect compromise of lilac and peach is painted above me. Matthew and my mother let me wander the dunes—not too far. I stroll across a sandy hill leaving a trail of small Keens indented in my wake. Even within my parents’ parameters, there is an exhilarant, downy freedom that flutters within the ivory cage of my ribs. I am a traveler charting new land. With each step, my feet fall over rocky Mars ground. All is quiet, still as untouched banks of snow. Eventually, the sky tells me it is time to join my family again, to dive into slumber. Stars push their way through the thinning veil of atmosphere. Matthew makes a fire and we feast and talk and laugh. We resign to our respective quarters, zipping the wall between the rooms shut. I am still an explorer in my dreams, dusted with moonlight.

I awake early the next morning, a peace and tranquility soft in my mind as the baby pink zebra striped pajama set on my skin. A tiny pink rose blooms in the center of the collar like the confusion in my mind when I slip out of the tent to see my family’s distress. My mind is blown by the act of heroism that was my heavy, unyielding slumber. The slightly damp ground is the only evidence of the storm that kissed the desert the night before. The green light streaking across the sky, the dust blowing through the air, the wind swiping anything it could grasp. All of the tent’s stakes were violently uprooted. Though I was small, I was, in this unconscious moment, impossibly mighty, the tent remaining on solid ground only under the force of my love, the expanse of my imagination, the vastness of my dreams, the infinite possibility of all that lay—lies—ahead of me, the magnitude of potential.

I expertly disassemble the warped spine of the tent. I gently tug between sections, thin strings of elastic an orchestra under my command. I help Mom fold away the rain-fly and we tuck it, together, into the brimming trunk. I do not yet know where today’s expedition will take us. But I am unafraid.

Saba Jana-Worku is a senior at Interlochen Arts Academy majoring in creative writing from Richmond, Virginia. Her work has been featured in the Red Wheelbarrow. Two of her pieces recently received Silver and Gold keys in the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, in addition to a nomination for the American Voices award. She greatly enjoys writing narrative fiction, screenplays, and, recently, creative nonfiction.